Avatars, meet the team and Yogscast

Today we are taking our lead from our backers. Some people have been creating their own avatars to demonstrate the support they have given to Godus. Paul and the art team at 22cans loved this idea so much that they've put together their own selection of images for you to choose from. We have 30 in total but here are the first 4, the rest we will make available to backers only tomorrow.

We're also extremely excited to reach the £250,000 mark!

To help out YOGSCAST and their charity fundraiser Honeydew's Honey Drive we organised an Ebay auction around the GODUS exclusive pendant and necklace. The auction raised £500 for the bees and Oxfam, so well done to the active bidders! We're absolutely delighted to be able to help the guys out.

Tim Rance

Q: Can you tell us what you do at 22cans?

A: CTO, review technical designs, evaluation technical solutions, leading dev work on Curiosity at the moment.

Q: What work are you most looking forward to doing on GODUS?

A: Anything multiplayer

Q: What are you working on today?

A: How curiosity will finish

Q: What’s the best thing about working at 22cans?

A: The great super-bright and enthusiastic crowd

Q: What are your favourite games?

A: Portal, Osmos

Q: What is the best feature you have ever seen in a game?

A: Portal gun

Q: What do you have for lunch?

A: Cheese Roll

Gary LeachQ: Can you tell us what you do at 22cans?

A: I'm the lead game engineer - I spend most of my time coding and the rest looking after the other programmers, making sure everything is running efficiently. And generally doling out abuse. Don't worry, they deserve it

Q: What work are you most looking forward to doing on GODUS?

A: Probably the special effects work - there's going to be a lot of this in GODUS, and finding creative and efficient ways to make this stuff jaw-dropping is something I'm really looking forward to.

Q: What are you working on today?

A: Various elements of the GODUS demo including some optimisation work and bits of visual polish.

Q: What’s the best thing about working at 22cans?

A: I have always preferred working with small teams; people often talk about the flexibility of small teams but another element is the chance to work on a large number of different areas.On the other hand, smalls teams normally have small exposure. With 22cans we really get the best of both worlds, since -lack- of exposure is not a problem we face!

Q: What are your favourite games?

A: I'm an RPG fan - Alternate Reality from the 8-bit era is still hard to beat, Ultima Underworld with its enormous amounts of atmosphere and jaw-dropping graphics (for the time!), most of the Zelda series and of course Fable!

Q: What is the best feature you have ever seen in a game?

A: For me, the time rewind system in Majora's Mask - the perfect mix of familiar with new, it totally captivated me. I always enjoyed revisiting previous areas in games that allowed this (excellently re-enforced in games that fly you past the characters and levels you played previously once the game is finished) but this made that idea a central game mechanic. Exploring the story elements piece by piece worked superbly.

Q: What do you have for lunch?

A: Cheese'n'pickle sandwich. Can't really go wrong.

That's it for today folks, today's update is a little shorter but rest assured everyone is working diligently on the Godus prototype.

Just wondering, how about some wallpapers? There have been loads of really nice artwork pieces and screenshots/computer made art showing off things - battles, destructive powers, the 'good' power one in the last screenshot, landscapes and people etc.

Would it be possible to whip up a few wallpapers of various resoloutions (for desktop, laptop and mobile?)

Another one - possibly even better for sharing the message - would be a facebook cover photo banner for Project GODUS - everyone visiting an individual's facebook page would see it across the top in big letters/pictures about project godus and may be interested!

Open-source-ish or modability, as Jared Eastman just said, would be a nice feature. We all know games like Minecraft, Half-Life and many others. Half-Life and related games practically live on their modability. The ability to run a dedicated server is also a must. And always remember the words of Gabe Newell: "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable." Even for legal buyers, it was better to download the illegal version of Assassin's Creed 2, because anyone with a somewhat unreliable internet connection (or a big family with lots of people using the internet at the same time) might have their game pause at random, while illegal players had no problem at all. The illegal version was actually better in quality. Valve on the other hand actually offers additional services to for example TF2 (though since that is free now, there isn't much of a reason left to pirate it). In the illegal TF2, one would only be able to use stock weapons and be severely limited in gameplay. In the case of the legal TF2, players are seemingly unlimited in their options while illegal players aren't. In the case of AC2, it is the pirates who are less limited. Guess which game I bought (back when TF2 still had a 20 euro price tag), and which game I didn't buy.

Talking about AC2 and its DRM-problems, will Godus have DRM? AC2 already proved that having no DRM is far better than having a bad one, and I generally don't like DRM too much.

I'm very excite to see this, I'd like to leave my opinion for the team for possible insight.

Please, oh please, make the game mod-able and at least pseudo open-source. I can tell you that you'll have a long lasting community of followers and lovers if the game can be played local lan, P2P (no dedicated server), hosted or developer run servers.

By making it mod-able and allowing the community to create content you can draw upon what the community likes and incorporate it into patches (think Android). By allowing local lan and P2P play you allow those who may not have internet or do not want to play with random strangers access to the multiplayer aspects.

One last tid-bit. I'm a self-proclaimed and proud media sharer (I download ripped games and movies) because demos are either non-existent or the game just doesn't have enough replay value to warrant a purchase in my opinion. Want to get the 'pirates' on your side? Allow people to pay what they want when the game launches but start the price at what YOU feel it's worth. Don't hold back features, make it the whole game. Tag the downloads that paid below what you feel it's worth and after the game has been played X number of days send that customer an email asking what you could do to the game to make it feel more worth while to them so they might want to pay your asking price. It's a new economy, cater to it and the pirates will be on your side. I paid $48 because I want to see this project succeed and have a group of people that can tame Peter's wild imagination into something feasible and wonderful without a bunch of unkept promises or speculation, not so much for copies of the game.